Friday, 18 November 2016

Could better reading instruction save lives?

There has been enormous media
coverage in Australia (Victoria in particular) in the last week about the
latest round of riots in a youth detention facility. I am not in a
position to identify the no doubt complex chain of events and background
circumstances that led up to these riots, however it is worth noting that:

·Victoria
has a strong history of policy leadership in youth justice. We have a unique
"dual track system" that enables (indeed
encourages) magistrates and judges to sentence 17-20 year olds to youth
detention facilities, rather than sending them to adult prisons, as occurs in
all other Australian states and territories, and indeed in most jurisdictions
in the developed world. When I have mentioned the dual track system to overseas
conference audiences, I see eyes widen and heads shake in wonder. That is
because these colleagues recognise that sending young people to adult prisons
accelerates rather than slows their progression into serious, recidivist
criminal activity, and removes them from prosocial influences such as education
and vocational training.

·Victoria has the lowest youth detention rate in Australia.
This means, however, that those young people who are in custody are the most
complex in terms of trauma exposure, child protection involvement, histories of
school suspension and expulsions, and low academic achievement. Research by my group also shows that some 50%
(conservatively estimated) of young offenders in Victoria have a previously
undiagnosed language disorder, and there is an association between severity of
offending and severity of disorded language skills. Language disorder was also
more common in those young people who entered youth justice via a period of Out
of Home Care on Child Protection orders. In a more recent study we conducted in NSW, 87%
of the youth offender sample had experienced school suspensions and expulsions.
As a means of changing their life trajectories, I think we'd have to agree that
these approaches deserve a giant "FAIL"

·Some
80% of the young people at Parkville Youth Justice are on remand. This means
they have not been found guilty of current charges in the Children's Court and
so are less likely than sentenced counterparts to engage in education and
offender rehabilitation programs. The system needs to be better resourced to do
a better job.

· Given
the time it takes many cases to be heard in the Children's Court, the remand
period may exceed the ultimate sentence, meaning that these young people are
then "discharged" from a volatile, unpredictable, and stressful
environment, back into the community - another volatile, unpredictable, and
stressful environment.

These are just a few of the reasons
that media commentators and armchair experts should not be leaping to
simplistic solutions that play to the well-loved "tough on crime" old
jukebox favourite. If punitive approaches worked (which they do not), we would
not need to be having this debate.

So
- what might help?

It might help if we thought
about the school-to-prison pipeline and the intervention
levers that can be pulled "upstream" to improve the life prospects of
young people who come from low-SES, vulnerable families and communities, and
who have been subjected to the soft bigotry of low expectations* from an
early age.

While ways of effectively
approaching the sad, complex, and often seemingly hopeless lives of young
people in custody are as elusive as they are thin on the ground, we are not
lacking in evidence about how to lift improvement in a key protective factor
for vulnerable young people: making the transition to literacy.

Children cannot succeed academically
if they do not make this transition, and they need to do so in the first three
years of school, to prevent a yawning canyon opening up between them, their
achieving peers, and the rapidly increasing language and literacy demands of
the school curriculum.

Ironically, we do not need more
research to know how to do a better job of teaching reading. We simply need
to do a better job of applying the abundance of high-quality research that has
been reported, replicated, and supported in three national inquiries (the USA, Australia,
and the UK). My interactions with teachers, as well as research of which I am a part, affirms time and
time again, that pre-service teacher education is not equipping teachers to
teach reading in ways that are consistent with the recommendations of these
national reviews.

Could
better reading skills save lives?

I'll leave the final word on this to
Rod Morgan, the former Chair of the UK, Youth Justice Board:

It may be too much to say that if we reformed
our schools, we would have no need of prisons. But if we better engaged our
children and young people in education we would almost certainly have less need
of prisons. Effective crime prevention has arguably more to do with education
than sentencing policy” (2007).

2 comments:

Hi Pamela,This is such a sensible informative piece have you considered submitting it to the newspapers (all sorts!) for the enlightenment of the masses? It's going into my 'Reading Lobby Group' folder for the long awaited time when the minister deigns to speak with us!

A blog on child and adolescent language, language competence and social disadvantage, early literacy instruction, youth offending, communication skills and the student doctor....and a few other bits and pieces.

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About Me

I'm a Professor and Head of the La Trobe Rural Health School and live and work in Bendigo, central Victoria. My research passion is language and literacy competence - primarily as this pertains to vulnerability in early life.
Views expressed on this blog are my own.
I have recently published a book (released by J&R Publishing in March 2017) with Dr Caroline Bowen:
Making Sense of Interventions for Children with Developmental Disorders. A Guide for Parents and Professionals.
http://www.jr-press.co.uk/making-sense-of-interventions-for-childrens-developmental-disorders.html
Australian orders can be placed at:
http://www.sandpiperpublications.com.au/Making-Sense-of-Interventions-scp100568.html